The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.
With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying.
Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.
In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator, they’d be worse off. The same isn’t really true with weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing.
We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic. Apple has kept two different product lines before.
It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.
This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.
If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.
There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.
Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?
When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP.
One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion. While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an innovative product that still has no competitor in the motion-graphics space.